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7 Critical SEO Errors of E-commerce Websites

It’s common for online merchants to think that by simply listing hundreds or even thousands of products on their e-commerce website, search engine traffic will start rolling in. It turns out that is far from reality.

The sad fact is, optimizing e-commerce websites for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is much harder than it is for blogs or simple 5 page company websites. By having lots of product pages constantly shuffling on and off the site, numerous problems arise that make SEO very difficult for e-commerce websites.

Today we are going to go over 7 common SEO errors of online stores and e-commerce websites.

1. Lack of Product Description

From my experience, this error usually is made by online gift stores (in the broad sense) and online clothing shops. Unfortunately, the complete lack of a text description of the product virtually puts an end to the chances of the page being in the top 10 of a search engine query, even in the case of low-frequency queries. So be sure to add a description to the item card; do not kill your page’s chances.

For example, these boots. Nothing special, just boots. Of course, the picture speaks a thousand words, but the search engines cannot see images. So make sure to add a description of the product.

A great way to measure how much unique content you need is to measure the default word count of a blank product page. Count all the words that are used in your navigation, sidebar, footer and any text that is present on a blank product page. Make sure your unique text, exceeds that “default” word count in order to have a heavier weight on unique content.

Obviously the more unique content you write for your product description will always be better for your SEO efforts. However, keep the following things in mind:

Don’t copy content from other websites. The search engines will penalize you for doing this.

You may want to test what description word count helps with purchase conversion. Too much content might hurt.

2. Using Product Descriptions from Manufacturers

If you want to be filtered by the search engines, just add a description from the manufacturer. This action can guarantee your site will be banned from the search engines.

The thing is that these descriptions are distributed to many online stores. And most of them are leaving the text in its original form. All this leads to a number of pages with non-unique content and filters from Google. To make this an even worse mistake, these manufacturer descriptions are usually not written in a way that sells.

The rule here is: always create unique content. Google has been getting better and better at kicking websites down the rankings because of duplicate content and content scraping.

Now creating unique content for thousands of products or wildly varying inventories can be a daunting task. I’ve been there before. You may want to consider putting a NO INDEX meta tag on product pages that you can’t write unique content for.

If you have thousands of product pages that you either can’t get to, or will be out your inventory in a matter of days, then certainly consider keeping them out the search engines. The point here is you don’t want to have thousands of pages with no unique content compared to only a few that do. What this does is it makes your website look like it has automatically generated thousands of simple webpages to try to gain SEO traffic. That’s exactly what you don’t want it to look like.

It’s much better to keep your SEO in good standing than let it suffer from poorly optimized product pages or a spammy looking content strategy.

3. Lack of Product Reviews

About 70% of buyers are looking for reviews of products on online stores or forums before making a purchase. This means that if your site has no such reviews, you are missing a very large percentage of the audience. Moreover, it is easier for review pages to reach the top of search results than selling pages.

Amazon.com has allowed its users to not only buy products, but also leave reviews of books, gadgets, and more. Thus, they have created a whole community of book lovers who share their experiences.

The beautiful thing about product reviews from customers is:

They are creating unique content for your online store and it’s free! We’ve been talking about all the trouble involved by not having unique content and how hard it is to create it. Product reviews solve this problem!

It keeps the product page “living”, which can help to bring the search engines back more often. Anytime you can update your site more frequently, the better it is for your overall SEO efforts.

4. Not Optimizing Product Pages Based on The Search Demand

Be sure to consider the demand and search keywords that people are typing into the search engines when you write headlines, title pages, and product descriptions. Otherwise, you may create a situation in which you are promoting something that no one is searching for. This is a common mistake of stores with a great number of different goods.

For example, you could make a page by mistake that has the title tag, H1 heading and image alt tag information optimized for the keyword phrase “Floral Pattern Scarf”, when it would be much wiser to optimize for a more specific keyword phase such as “Chanel Floral Pattern Scarf.”

With that said, here are some tips to help you better optimize those product pages:

Use model numbers in your title tags and H1 headings.

Use brand names in your title tags and H1 headings.

Don’t forget to fill out your image alt tag information!

Don’t keyword stuff the page with the keyword phrase by repeating it over and over again.

And never, ever, use iframes to display content. Make sure your content actually exists on the product page it is meant to be on.

5. Non-Unique Titles

Another problem of the large online stores is duplicated title tags. Watch for their uniqueness and try to avoid identical values. It is the school foundation of SEO, but when we are talking about online shopping, for some reason, many have stopped observing this simple rule.

Here is what a title tag looks like if you view the source code of a webpage. This example is from the SEOmoz.org home page:

It’s difficult to create unique title tags when you sell multiple items from the same brand, or similar items from many brands. You will inevitably repeat the same keywords over and over again. Search engines are aware of this occurrence, and therefore you should focus on making unique key phrases.

A lot of online shoppers are searching for a key phrase oppose to a single keyword. A formula that tends to work well is the “band-model” title tag recipe:

For example your title tag should be structured in this way: Brand – Model – Item Type

An important tip for nailing down the right keywords is to survey your customers to see what language they use when they talk about the products you sell. The structure in which they phrase your products will clue you into how they might search for them.

6. Lack of “Speaking” urls

What is a “speaking” url? Here is an example: http://www.readanybook.com/ebook/harry-potter-and-the-prisoner-of-azkaban-65. Speaking urls are also known as “keyword friendly urls”.

We see the name of the book right in the site address. It is very important in terms of SEO to create such a url for all of your products. No more anonymous IDs! Make your profile unique to the search engine with a unique url.

There are only three reasons why you should use speaking urls:

Semantics: It makes it easy for the customer or searcher to know what to expect when they click on the url. If you have an incredibly long url full of numbers and gibberish – it can look spammy and be a turn off.

Keyword and Anchor Link Luck: There is a chance that the URL will be picked up by another website and re-posted. Important keywords will be present in the anchor tag if they url is used as the anchor text. Getting keywords within anchor text that points back to your website is the main driver of getting to the top of search engine rankings.

Relevancy: Having relevant keywords in the URL used to be a big driver for domain names. Google is starting to put less priority on that, however it can’t hurt to have relevant keywords in your urls for product pages.

7. A Lot of Duplicate Content

Pages to print, archives with different sorting elements, tags, and more – all these things, which create duplicates, should not be indexed by search engines and must be closed in robots.txt. This is important because your site can get sanctions because of duplicate pages (especially on large sites such as many online shopping sites).

This content appears on many pages of a fashion online store.

Here are some tips to trimming down duplicate content:

Use robots.txt to block areas that create duplicate content such as archives, tags and even category pages in some cases.

Use the canonical tag to indicate which web pages are the pages you want indexed. For example, if your shopping cart creates new urls because of reviews or comments (meaning you have more than one page with the exact same content, except one has reviews or comments and the original does not), the canonical tag will tell the search engines which page they should be paying attention to.

You can add nofollow attributes to links that point to areas of duplicate content. However, you have to be extremely thorough at making sure you find every single link that needs to be nofollowed (because Google will find them).

The Golden Rule of SEO – Make Usability a Priority

As you know, Google is a search engine that is very worried about its users and their experience. First of all, you should make your online store convenient and useful for customers in order to achieve its respect. What is good and unique to your clients – it’s good for Google.

The more time people spend on your site, and less they click back to the search results page is a great indication that Google is sending them to the right place.

Finally, people who like your website and what it has to offer are much more likely to link to it – and as we said before, links are what drive you to top the search results page!

What errors in online stores’ search engine optimization have you identified? Please leave them in the comments below.

There’s also an opportunity for many e-commerce sites to target long tail traffic by providing a buyers guide or blog. Answering keyword-related questions is a good method for driving relevant traffic to their website.

It’s true a blog will capture long tail traffic and help the e-commerce site but would you go with a sub domain approach or sub folder? I’ve been thinking lately a sub domain would work better especially because of panda/penguin. What do you think?

We have a large ecommerce store and would like your opinion on optimizing product pages, we have 2500 products. The problem is its an office furniture store with products like “white wooden armelss bankers chair” and there are only so many ways to describe each of these products uniquely.

Researching other online furniture stores, most only have a two sentence manufacturer’s description, and a couple have a paragraph with alomost all the same content as everyone else. There does not appear to be unique content for products like this at online webstores.

Also how unique can your product pages be with “white wooden armless bankers chairs”?

So how can you help your ranking? Should you try to add unique description sentences like: “Sturdy and built to last, white finish does not scratch easily” and do this for each of the 2500 product pages?

We can work on doing that for each product, which will take over a year. While that is in process we would have some unique content product pages, and many with only a couple sentence descriptions.

Curious to get your take on point number 2. Have you seen alorithmic penalties occur on product pages that contain manufacturer descriptions? How about if there are the manufacturer descriptions but additional unique content is added?

I ask because many times, the manufacturer “descriptions” are really just factual bulleted lists that contain very valuable information for the visitor. Getting rid of this to simply have “unique content” seems counterproductive to the user experience.

See a short list of bulleted points is very little content in the first place. And if everyone selling the same product has the same bulleted list – well no one is different (that doesn’t impress the search engines). It’s much better to expand on that list that is provided, giving the customer a lot more insight as to what the product offers.

Yes, unique is important. But how do you do when the description is taken from Amazon API thru using some kind of plugin(azon WP) ??
Any advise how to optimize the page ??
Hope to hear your great advise.
Thanks.

Well that’s the issue with using automated services. There is a chance it’s actually going to hurt more than help. Again, if it’s just a short snippet that’s not a big deal. Just be sure to add your own description as well.

Hi Sean,
re; 1 url per product?
How dose this play out if you have a product in a few different categories, eg. size category, brand category, type category. so i reality it might look like;

/domain/size/product-a
/domain/brand/product-a
/domain/type/product-a
Would one have to place a no-follow after 2 of the above URL’s to eliminate dupilcation?
Also is there a specific site map generator that you know works with Magento?
Thanks
Paul

Re: 1 URL per product
This is a really good opportunity to use the rel=canonical tag. If you have the same piece of content that is accessible through several dynamically-generated categories, pick one ‘canonical’ version, and tag it in there for all the products. All are still accessible, but search engines know to only give credit to the canonical version.

I agree with all your points. As talking to duplicate content things which I see the product page where you can see different page of a sing product due to difference in color or size which you mostly see in ecommerce site of shoes or cell phones. Instead of creating different page for each variant you can show it on one page only.

Question: First off – Great Article. On #7- for that little highlighted block of text that is duplicate content, is it really that detrimental? I ask because I have a website with about 1300 blog articles for 7 different categories. We are considering automatically placing a short sentence in the footer to link back to the blog category landing page, ie: “To learn more about sleep problems and solutions visit our landing page.” Is this not beneficial?

Not taking the time to create custom product descriptions is a big one. Reviewing analytics data and incorporating frequently searched queries into your descriptions and searchable fields is key.

Especially in gift markets, I find creating a custom product name is a good idea. Once a consumer can search your product by exact name/sku with competitors it can be a losing battle, to compete on cost.

Great tips! Having unique product descriptions will take a bit of time but will pay off in the long run. Personally, I read the descriptions of products before I purchase since there could be fine print that the picture didn’t show. (Most of the time, they’re rather amusing!)

I think sometimes an ecommerce site can be quite “heavy” resulting in slow load times. This can definitely be true of Magento sites and therefore I think another error is not beefing up the server resources for these installations. If the site does not load quickly, there is a very real chance that the visitor will leave before the page renders.

If magento is the case, it is not about the core. It is totally about your compiling and server type. You MUST use at least VPS for magento. It is not for regular wp/joomla type of e-commerce solution. It is really really flexible and more powerful than others.

Site Architecture is also a common mistake. Too many navigation links (not prioritizing the main categories and therefore, diluting the links and the page itself). The same products in too many categories – misleads the crawlers into categorizing product pages. Lastly, making all pages the same priority level off of the home page – we want to think all of our pages have the same level of importance, but they really don’t!

Well thought out & detailed post. I love it ! Just got back from a (new) client meeting yesterday where large portions of their (3000+ page) site are excluded in robots.txt because of the performance hit they take when the site is crawled by a bot (which, of course, only addresses bots who abide by the robots.txt directives).

Your article is a great reminder that, once we’ve got the worst of the offending bots id’d & blocked (so we can start to get those pages indexed) the bigger question is which pages/directories really should remain disallowed — at least until we allocate the resource to rewrite those product descriptions.

Clearly, as you’ve outlined here, either you clean up the product descriptions, etc. or you should exclude the page.

I totally disagree with adding a NOINDEX tag on product pages you haven’t found time to write descriptions for. I would never actively tell a search engine to stop indexing content that is actually helpful to a user. It would be a much better solution to use a dynamically-generated meta description, or a factory product description than it would be to remove it completely from the index.
I would always go with machine-generated over nothing at all. Then as resources became available to write unique, compelling copy, that’s when I would replace the generated copy.

I’ve run ecommece sites before where we had thousands of pages of products that wouldn’t get indexed and it was pretty apparent that it was because they lacked unique, descriptive content. The idea of putting the NOINDEX tag is to show the engines only your best content to keep up “your batting average” so to speak. Of course this entirely up to you and your team. Each site has a different trust ranking in the eyes of the engines, so some can get away with being poorly descriptive while others can’t.

I’m with AJ. I have no doubt that rewriting every product description is enormously helpful, but implying that it’s necessary to noindex duplicate descriptions doesn’t jibe with my experience. The ecommerce site I work for has about 400 products. Some of our pages get sandboxed from time to time, which in inevitable when link building, but I still have 40% of our product descriptions left to rewrite—yet virtually all of them are somewhere in G’s index.

Telling readers to noindex their pages before at least checking their status beforehand is rather extreme. Many of those pages might have internal links that would stop passing juice to their target pages, resulting in collateral damage.

Thanks for the advice. I’ve got a new e-commerce site and have been building out a line of digital papers – with a big chunk of the description copied on each page. I noticed in Google Webmaster Tools that about two-thirds of my pages are “not selected”. The duplicate content may be my issue. Oh boy, I have a lot of work to do!

Everything you have written is spot on, especially about using product description from suppliers. I actually do that for our online bookstore. Without them it is so long and time consuming process to write book descriptions for each book, and so much easier to use the publisher blurb. The books i do write unique descriptions for myself, strangely enough do for the most part rank better than copy/pasted versions, now i know why. I would say for our stores, that is our biggest area to improve on.

I am always amazed by thin content on product pages. I try to write unique wordy keyword included descriptions sometimes containing links to other product pages or even to pages on other relevant (non competitor) sites.

Hey Sean, really informative post. I though your suggestion on analyzing survey response to see how customers are referring to your products and then optimizing for those search terms was a creative approach. Thanks for sharing!

Well, if you create an appropriate link based architecture it shouldn’y be a problem. You can have that exist along side filters. You can do a lot of tricks with your robots.txt file to block Google from indexing weird filtered laden URLs – in addition to dynamically adding NO INDEX tags to filtered results.

I always think it’s a good rule of thumb to do a character count of all the duplicate content on your product pages. Add up the total amount of content created by your navigational text, footer text, sidebar text etc. Then at the very least make sure you write the same amount of unique content for your product description. Obviously the more the merrier for SEO purposes…

Sorry but to pick up on a point about unique content with regards to manufacturers descriptions. To put it bluntly manufacturers descriptions and bullet points usually describe the item you may be selling in the best way possible, for you or indeed search engines or should I say the great god google to expect different websites selling the same items from the same manufacturers to re-write product descriptions on an ecommerce site that may be selling hundreds or even thousands of products is quite frankly ridiculous! How many different ways do you think there are to describe the same product with the same functions for f**ks sake! Stop sucking up to google, tell em to go f**k themselves and for christs sake will someone create a search engine that works like good old fashioned search engines used to without all this SEO nonsense! or am I the only one that just lately in 2013 that finds google search results complete and utter crap half the time? I’m increasingly turning to Bing more than i ever used to!!

I am completely agree with mat point of view. I think that in fact,google dont think about to provide the “best user experience” but thinking about to provide “best google experience” i mean they want to win even more control about any web around internet, they said “you have to do on my way or you will pay consecuences”, well , from the user side, duplicate content about a product is not only “bad experience” but good one. Could you imagine you are selling a screws for instance. You need to know exactly size and technical properties..or chemist compound or a telescope or scientific instrument …..so the best information is provided by manufacturer so man,you can write poetry about screws , compounds or telescopes of course, but the only true is that you are giving irrelevant information to user and confusing him/her. In my view, talking about duplicate content in a online shop is stupid. Nobody in the real world , changes product tag for your “unique content tab”, for sure…your tag will be unique, but wrong and confusing.Google is getting paranoic about any website, because they hate organic traffic due dont give them money.Google would be interested about service, empathy, quality , and legal merchandising , and good payment methods instead. But of course , it is too complicated for Google “good”..and above all…not interesting thing for them.Show me the money, and the power guys, follow me, and you will be in the google paradise they said in ohter words..I wonder how a lot of webmasters and seos are so fanatic about google rules without no sense..In fact they dont mind at all the user experience…but his own income experience.May be i am a little rude, but we must stop google or become slaves..THINK BY YOURSELF!

Hi, been Googling for a while. I have a question I haven’t found answer for:
What if I have a single product (part actually) that can be used on many different places and want to rank it for each one the same? To put an example:
Say I have a “memory module” that is compatible with many computer brands, for example Compaq, Lenovo, Dell, Sony and etc (many more).
I want to rank for “Compaq memory module”, “Lenovo memory module”, etc.
I know that for showing up on SERPs, I must have the main keyword on the title. How can I do, without repeating the same product content with different titles (I know that this method will not help actually), to rank the memory module for all the “compatible” brands?
Will it be the same if I put “Laptop memory module” in the title of the post, and then the “Compatible” brands listed inside the body of the post?
I don’t know if I was clear with my question, let me know…
Thanks!

From your article, “7. A Lot of Duplicate Content” this section are really helpful for online store entrepreneur. Because most of the times, webmaster and online marketers face lots of duplication on the product page and other detail pages.

Thanks for this information. But if we consider an eCommerce website builder. We don’t have there any products or their listing just our packages to get online store. In that case what we will have to follow?

I am satisfied with the thoughts shared in this post! My e-commerce business is also in the running status so i want to share my personal experience here with all of you. In starting days i also faced lot of difficulties like unique meta-tag data, product reviews, product descriptions etc, because i was unknown to the importance of all these factors in my business of online shopping. Therefore i decided to put all these efforts in my e-commerce business and got success to a large extent. So, nice advice for all of us. Thanks very much for your effort…

Hello,
Firstly, thanks for this article. I am a complete beginner in the world of e-commerce so any info of this kind is incredibly useful to me. I have a question about the product description though. I started a used books e-shop and currently I don’t have product descriptions. I was wondering what is the procedure for books. If I shouldn’t copy content from other websites, how can I create my own descriptions without actually reading all the books which is impossible. Is it ok to copy the blurbs? Is there a database of some kind, should I read descriptions on other sites and then create my own just from that? (this seems also very demanding). Thanks for any info.

Hi, I am working on an eCommerce website, it has thousand of URLs in Google Index with parameters used for filtering products. These pages showing same title and description as parent category page, here are some sample pages-

I agree with a majority of what Sean said, but there are some factors that should be considered regarding copied content from manufacturers’ descriptions.

First, with any website, there is a ratio of unique content versus copied content involved. The best strategy is to keep the technical bullet points from the manufacturer and then create your unique sales copy with even more descriptive text.

Second, having a manufacturer’s descriptions on your website will not get your website banned from Google. I have worked on a lot of eCommerce websites over the years, and I have a client currently that has nothing but content from manufacturers. His website has been this way for years and he continues to gain organic traffic each month. If you are wondering how and why, read my next point.

Lastly, the authority of a domain and a page has a huge impact on whether or not product pages with copied descriptions can rank well. Sean mentioned that tons of retailers use the same descriptions from manufacturers. Simply put, the eCommerce website with the most authority will rank higher than websites with lesser authority even though the content on the product pages are the same across both sites. You can find many retailers ranking higher than a manufacturer even though the product description is the same and the original content came from the manufacturer.

This is the same concept as a website that has high authority posting an article on their website that came from another website with less authority. The website with high authority will outrank the other website even though they copied the post from the website with lesser authority. Hopefully this will be fixed one day soon. Neil has an article on QuickSprout that covers this further.

I would actually love to prove a point and paste this comment on my own website before submitting it here. Then I wait until it is indexed, and come back to post my comment on this page. This blog as more authority than my website, so it would outrank my site. To test, I would just copy a portion of it word for word and then place it in a Google search. I have no doubts that this URL would be #1 and my website would be somewhere below. This is not a good test as it can have a negative impact when Panda comes back around.

The best approach for generating ideas about the structure of your product pages is to look at the top retailers that consistently rank. Don’t just pick one, pick 5 and dissect their pages. Take notes on the similarities and test. But never test anything on your clients’ websites unless you know there will be no negative impact.

Thank you for sharing this important information.I thought e-commerce site most time quite “heavy”, resulting in a slow load time, due to more product images and data. It definitely can be a real Magneto site, so I think that another error is not accelerating server resources, these facilities. If the site does not load quickly before there is a very real opportunity to render the page, visitors will leave.

Thanks for the tips about SEO for e-commerice sites. I am setting up a new tie dye shopping site and am looking to make it the best I can. I will try to use extra good descriptions for all my items. PEACE!

An eCommerce website would roll in ever successfully with powerful online branding techniques. A skip or two may be an option, but too many mistakes repeatedly occurring can lead to a big loss. Points displayed are truly amazing.

Transparent product exhibition and all pertinent site optimizing efforts could create wonders!

Pointed all the required data, to optimize each eCommerce store. As I’ve seen such a large amount of peoples just using a similar product descriptions which the brand’s product description that duplicates and scrap their websites. each store ought to focus on this. Thanks for the dear data Crazy Egg.

The only way to find out is to track it. Use an analytics package like Kissmetrics to setup conversion tracking for your keyword phrases, and then compare them against each other to see what’s producing the best results. Knowing will help you better optimize your site as a whole and know which efforts are worth focusing on and which ones should be let go.

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